fusion of inner and outher space

Was on Massive Attack’s concert today. And was massively attacked. Great concert not only because of their music (i like very much from their beginnings) and visual effects but because their concert had a message. Clear message. As there were a lot of meaningful words rolling on a big screen behind about war, all articles for impeachment of J.W. Bush, prisoners without a trial, quotes about freedom and democracy (No man is above the law and no man below it) the whole message can be summed up: “Fear is not a natural state of civilized people.”(Aung San Suv Kyi)” People have to be aware what is going on, have to think, have to be critical toward democracy preachers otherwise other will think instead of them. Fear paralyses, fear change brain’s gray matter, puts you into inferior position,…

Not talking about normal human response on adrenalin rush; i am talking about damaging effect of constant, invisible, omnipotently present fear without a real bases, which we are hearing about through media every day. Either terrorism or global warming or damaging diseases or god… They might attack you at the moment you expect the least, so be rather afraid. Very afraid. Constant fear makes you run instead of fight. (see 2. The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear of Adam Curtis)

There is a lot of them who are more than willing to comfort you but for some return. Like exchange of true freedom for fake freedom. Like putting your worries into their hands to take care of them. As quote from Massive Attack’s big screen says: “Freedom is never free.”

Like this guys who have the power to rise the awareness among masses accompanied with great music. It’s a food for emotions and mind.

Watched lately documentary Secret rulers of the world and if the half of what they’re saying is true, than this world is scary place for a living. But if people don’t know they take everything as granted.

Reminded me on very good Paul Auster ‘s book In The Century of last Thing. A world, narrowed to pure survival, trapped into corrupted system which imprisoned people. It’s a good portrait of devastation of either outher or inner person’s world. Once you are within the system, the possibility to escape is limited almost to zero. The only thought to keep you alive is that there , outside this system is another world, better one, the one you still keep in your memories. Or the one your desperate hope has built.

In In the Country of Last Things Paul Auster offers a haunting picture of a devastated world – futuristic world – but one which chillingly shadows our own. – Faber and Faber.

I could be yours
We can unwind
All these have flaws
All these have flaws

You’d agree it’s a typical high
You fly as you watch your name go by
And once the name goes by
Not thicker than water nor thicker than mud
And the eight k thuds it does

Sunset so thickly
Let’s make it quiet and quickly
Don’t frown
It taste’s better on the way back down

I could be yours
We can unwind
All these have flaws
All these have flaws
All these have flaws
Will lead to mine

We can unwind
All these have flaws
All these have flaws
Will lead to mine
Will see to
All these have flaws
All these have flaws
Will see to
All these have flaws
Will lead to mine
We can unwind all our flaws
We can unwind all our flaws

It’s not realy so innocent what going on with our …human mind… how much politics or this neocons games effect our brains….memories, hormons, endorphines…will post next how real and imagined is close and what we see is what we get …

This suggests that really bad experiences may have lasting effects on the brain, even in healthy people,” said Barbara Ganzel, the study’s lead researcher and postdoctoral fellow at Cornell’s College of Human Ecology.

ScienceDaily -Jun. 4, 2008 — Healthy adults who were close to the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, have less gray matter in key emotion centers of their brains compared with people who were more than 200 miles away, finds a new Cornell study.

The study — one of the first to look at the effects of trauma on the brains of healthy adults — is published in the April issue of Neurolmage. It follows a Cornell study by the same authors that found people living near the World Trade Center on 9/11 have brains that are more reactive to such emotional stimuli as photographs of fearful faces. Combined, the two studies provide an emerging picture of what happens in the brains of healthy people who experience a traumatic event.

The smaller volume of gray matter — composed largely of cells and capillary blood vessels — that Ganzel found were in areas that process emotion and may be, Ganzel suggests, the brain’s normal response to trauma. The subjects in the study did not suffer from any mental or physical health disorders. Gray matter, a major component of the nervous system, is composed of the neuron cell bodies that process information in the brain.

About half of Americans experience a trauma in their lifetime, and scientists know a lot about the effects of trauma on the brains of people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but not about people without clinical disorders. And most people, Ganzel said, who experience a trauma don’t get PTSD.

Key brain areas that are smaller are also more responsive to threat, said Ganzel, suggesting that these changes may be a helpful response to living in an uncertain environment.

“We have known for a long time that trauma exposure can lead to subsequent vulnerability to mental health disorders years after the trauma,” Ganzel added. “This research gives us clues about the biology underlying that vulnerability.”

The researchers used two types of magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of 18 people who were within 1.5 miles of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and compared them to scans of 18 people who lived at least 200 miles away at the time. One type showed the gray matter volume, and the other showed the brain’s response to emotional stimuli (pictures of fearful and calm faces). Those who were close to the disaster on Sept. 11 showed more emotional reactivity in the amygdala, a brain area that detects the presence of threatening information.

Combining the brain data revealed that those who were near the World Trade Center had smaller, more reactive amygdalas, and this, in turn, was related to how anxious they were years later. Several other brain regions associated with emotion processing were also smaller in those who were close to the disaster.

The researchers also found that study subjects who had experienced other types of trauma (violent crimes, sudden death of a loved one) showed a similar reduction in gray matter and similar response to emotional faces and anxiety.

“This suggests that the differences we see in the brain and behavior of people who were near the Sept. 11 disaster are not specific to that one event,” Ganzel said. “And it turns out there is a very similar pattern of gray matter volume loss with normal aging, which raises the question of what role trauma plays in the aging brain.”

Adapted from materials provided by Cornell University. Original article written by Sheri Hall.

Magnetic resonance imaging of the brains of healthy adults more than three years after Sept. 11, 2001, shows areas that have less gray matter volume in those who were near ground zero on 9/11, compared with those who were much farther away. This is three views of the brain areas that have lower gray matter volume in the 9/11-exposed group. Notably, all of these areas (which show up brighter in this image) are associated with the processing of emotion. (Credit: Image courtesy of Cornell University)

ScienceDaily (May 8, 2007) — According to a new brain study, even people who seemed resilient but were close to the World Trade Center when the twin towers toppled on Sept. 11, 2001, have brains that are more reactive to emotional stimuli than those who were more than 200 miles away

That is the finding of a new Cornell study that excluded people who did not have such mental disorders as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression. One of the first studies to look at the effects of trauma on the brains of healthy people, it is published in the May issue of the journal Emotion.

“These people appear to be doing okay, but they may, indeed, be having more sensitive responses to upsetting stimuli,” said Elise Temple, a co-author and assistant professor of human development at Cornell.

More than half the population experiences trauma, which makes people more likely to develop PTSD, depression, anxiety and physical illness later in life, according to other studies. Also, trauma has been found to make the brain’s emotional processing centers — particularly the amygdalae, the parts of the brain that judge emotional intensity and make emotional memories — more sensitive in cases of PTSD.

The findings suggest that events that trigger shock, fear and horror that are within a normal range — may cause similar changes in the brain that traumas do. Victims may experience lingering symptoms (bad dreams, jumpiness, thinking about the incident and avoiding the site of the trauma), but they are not severe. However, the kinds of changes that these traumas cause in the brain, the researchers suspect, create vulnerability to developing future mental disorders.

Specifically, the Cornell researchers found that three years after Sept. 11, 2001, the amygdalae were most sensitive in those who were close to the World Trade Center. These individuals tended to still experience lingering symptoms that were not severe enough to be diagnosed as a mental disorder. Those with lingering symptoms showed significantly more sensitive emotional reactions in the brain when stimulated by photographs of fearful faces.

“Our study suggests that there may be long-term neural correlates of trauma exposure, even in people who have looked resilient,” said lead author Barbara Ganzel, Cornell M.S. ’99, Ph.D. ’02, a postdoctoral researcher in human development at Cornell. “Up until now, there has been very little evidence of that.”

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to see how people’s brains responded to photographs of fearful versus calm faces, the scans of 11 people who were within 1.5 miles of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, were compared with those who were living more than 200 miles away at the time; none of the subjects had psychiatric disorders.

“We know that looking at fearful faces in normal adults tends to activate the amygdalae relative to looking at neutral faces,” said Ganzel. “So we were looking to see if people who have had a very bad experience would have more response to this relatively mild everyday stimulus.”

Indeed, the amygdalae of those who were close to the twin towers were significantly more activated than that of others, even when other factors were controlled for in the analysis.

“People who had experienced traumas that left them with more lingering symptoms were the ones who had higher activity in their fear centers,” said Temple. “We think that the World Trade Center experience was traumatic enough that it left them with hyperactive amygdalae.”

Other co-authors include B.J. Casey, director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at the Weill Cornell Medical College; Henning Voss, a physicist at the CitiGroup Biomedical Imaging Center in New York City, where the fMRI scanning took place; and Gary Glover of Stanford University, who developed the fMRI techniques used.

The films compare the rise of the American Neo-Conservative movement and the radical Islamistmovement, making comparisons on their origins and noting strong similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is in fact a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.

Precaution as a new name of the game…act upon what might happen (what is already told due political and media agenda) and not upon what is real ….

The common denominator: fear.. either of terrorism or global warming…just to keep people in constant fear of inevitable… politicians have to invent a problem to cure it and to defend people from it…if people are constantly occupied with fear of endless treat they sure can not think critical of something else. Even thought that there are no reasonable facts behind. They invent them, they promote them and they become a universal truth. How sadly.

No clear connection between Al Qaeda and 9/11 or to Iraq; no clear connection between CO2 and global warming or sea rise and global warming…but yet…it’s universal truth; its a big hype…kids are more afraid according to research of global worming than terrorism…but where are real facts behind?

if you doubt about terrorism or global warming, you are heretic or as they say ..it’s same as you deny holocaust …

I don’t know how much its true or not on both topics, cos i don’t know for sure who finances one or other media but if doubting is almost a sin, we are back in dark middle age and inquisition… the reasonable doubt is a base of any further human development…

Scientific models or some partial information, promoted as a truth, and nothing but the truth makes me pretty nervous and sceptic.

=====================

And just today emerged: Army Radio had quoted a top official in Jerusalem claiming that a senior member in the entourage of President Bush, who visited Israel last week, had said in a closed meeting here that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action against Iran was called for.

Ideologist behind Neoconservatives: Leo Strauss – unique America, who is destined to fight the devil in the world, the only good force in the world. Strauss thought that myths are necessary to give people meaning and purpose of life and throught this keep stable society.

====================================

PULP (The Fear)

======================================

When Franklin D. Roosevelt said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”, he meant it in a philosophical sense. But physicians know that the fight-or-flight response that protects the body from harm can sometimes backfire. “If you are terrorised by a God-awful stress, it can take you out,” says Richard Verrier of Deaconess Hospital in Boston. “I don’t think you would find a cardiologist who thinks it’s impossible to die of fright.”